Politi-flicks: Chicks

Twenty million. That's the number of women who could have voted in the last Presidential election but didn't.

An organization called WVWV -- Women's Voices. Women Vote -- wants women to know about this and improve their participation in the electorate. To this end they've created a series of ads featuring female stars like Angie Harmon, Felicity Huffman, Regina King, Rosario Dawson, Tyne Daly, Lauren Graham, Marg Helgenberger and Daphne Zuniga, all urging women to use their power in the voting booth.

The most arresting of these ads is called "My First Time" linked here on YouTube. It's wall-to-wall double entendres, more sex winks than in an entire James Bond movie, but there's no denying the passion these actors communicate on the way to the "VOTE November 7" punchline.

You can check out the rest of their spots on the organization's dedicated website here.

While Diebold-rigging and voter roll-purging can chip away at my sense of patriotism, there's some sort of 7th grade civics class reverence for the inaliable right to pull that lever (the way we did it back in Delmar, NY) that gives me the tingles. It's important to remember that so many people fought and lost their lives over the simple right to vote, not the least of which was the U.S.A. circa 1776 and, later, African-Americans during the Civil Rights era.

So there's a corresponding sense of disgust when I read that Rush Limbaugh is devoting his not insubstantial bullhorn to smearing the WVWV organization and, by extension, their essentially non-partisan message. Is it because women, particularly married women, are not polling the way Rush and his team would like this cycle?

Finally, there's another video on the web from a previous election, aimed at younger women voters, which in hip fashion recalls the entire history of voter enfranchisement, starting with the original rules under which this nation worked. It's called "Chicks Rock", and reminds us that what Rush may wish to suppress took 150 years to amend into our Constitution.